Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (Allen Lane)
The drive towards decarbonisation and the search for alternative, less-polluting sources of energy vex our planet and its politicians and decision-makers. Many wealthy countries are working to strip pollutants and emissions-belching elements out of our industrial processes and individual lives.
This is an age of environmental consciousness. At least that鈥檚 the argument. But it is one Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, a historian of science and technology at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, rejects entirely in More and More and More: An all-consuming history of energy.
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It isn鈥檛 that Fressoz believes climate change is a hoax. Far from it: he sees it as a pressing issue, but he thinks we spend too long praising moves towards a green 鈥渢ransition鈥�. He sees this as a fictitious concept, a distortion of the history of energy creation and consumption by the producers out to delay genuine change.
The story most of us know is that we have progressed through ages of energy: we burned wood, replaced it with coal, created electricity using oil and gas and entered the atomic era in the mid-20th century. We are now in the age of renewables.
Except that we aren鈥檛, argues Fressoz, in a densely researched polemic designed to shock readers out of their belief in the progress being made by Western countries in reducing environmental impact.
Rather than each successive energy source replacing the last outmoded one, as we reduce overall extraction, each epoch is additive. They are piling on top of each other, pushing consumption ever higher as they feed off the previous sources, and accumulating more and more and more damage to Earth.
Past energy historians have contributed to the problem, Fressoz reckons, by trying to neatly divide the past into discrete eras. Take the purported transition from wood to coal, for instance. Many mine shafts were propped up with wooden props 鈥� preferred by miners because they were more disposable than specially designed steel struts and, crucially, because they would start to crack when weak, a useful signal to get out before a mine collapse.
And as coal production tripled in the then Soviet Union between 1950 and 1970, Fressoz points out, so, too, did demand for timber, to the extent that the Soviets struggled to keep up supplies to Ukraine, a big coal producer.
The book is full of facts and stories, which tumble over each other to hammer home Fressoz鈥檚 main argument: far from getting better, we are getting worse and have much to rethink. Who knew that, according to International Energy Agency figures cited in the book, wood 鈥減rovides twice as much energy as nuclear fission, twice as much as hydroelectricity, and twice as much as solar and wind power combined鈥�? Or, Fressoz writes, that 鈥渢echnological innovations have never, right up to the present day, caused any flow of material consumption to disappear鈥�?
But despite such astounding data points and a tremendous depth of research, Fressoz isn鈥檛 a natural storyteller. An existential cry for change needs straightforward, punchy prose, punctuated by killer facts and stats. At times, messages are thrown about in a melange that loses persuasive power.
In part, this is because Fressoz sticks to his principles: we have downplayed our issues by creating neat stories. That said, for his message to hit home, he should meet readers halfway. At his best, Fressoz makes them as voracious to devour his book as to guzzle oil and gas. But the effect can be less an all-consuming history of energy and more an overwhelming flood of words.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a writer based聽in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
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